Recent Projects

New York City reached an environmental milestone today as the final deadline passed in a multi-year effort to eliminate the city’s dirtiest residential heating oils. Policy Integrity played a major role in shaping and supporting the NYC Clean Heat program, which has saved hundreds of lives by curbing air pollution.

Today, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not consider costs at the appropriate stage of the regulatory process before crafting the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. This rule, which regulates toxic emissions from power plants, will now be sent back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where the judges will decide how the EPA should proceed.

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismissed the first challenges to President Obama’s signature climate change initiative—the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. In the ruling, the judges said they would not take the unprecedented step of blocking the EPA’s regulation before a final rule has even been issued.

Since 1996, there have been at least 285 incidents of child strangulation by window covering cords. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering a regulation to address this issue, and we recently submitted public comments on the Commission’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking. We offered a number of suggestions for improving upon the Commission’s preliminary analysis of the costs and benefits of eliminating cords from window coverings. These included recommendations that the Commission consider the prevention of parental grief as an unquantified benefit of regulation and that it perform separate cost-benefit analyses for each major category of covering (e.g., vinyl blinds, wood blinds, roman shades).

Our new regulatory report offers guidance on how how the EPA can improve its cost-benefit analysis for a new proposed rule regulating the dispersants used to clean up oil spills and other major pollution events.

Policy Integrity recently filed public comments on the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM’s) new offshore leasing proposal, suggesting that the agency update its use of “option value” to improve its valuation of offshore resources.

Policy Integrity senior advisor Michael Livermore represented the plaintiff in Center for Sustainable Economy v. Jewell, a lawsuit challenging the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM’s) 2012-2017 leasing plan for the Gulf of Mexico and the Alaskan coast. The Center for Sustainable Economy (CSE) argued that incomplete and flawed economic analysis leads the government to sell resource leases too quickly and too cheaply, potentially costing the American public billions of dollars and leading to high-risk drilling. Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled against CSE in the case. However, part of the ruling could lead to major changes in how the government values the natural resources it leases.

The Supreme Court will soon hear a challenge to the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (commonly known as the MATS rule). Policy Integrity has submitted an amicus brief in support of the EPA for this case.